Across Odisha, Adivasi and forest-dependent communities are restoring forests through collective governance, cultural memory and everyday stewardship.
From sacred groves and Thengapali patrols to women-led forest federations, conservation here is rooted in rights, reciprocity and lived ecological knowledge.
On World Environment Day, Odisha’s community-led conservation movements offer a powerful reminder: forests thrive when the people who depend on them are recognised as their custodians.
Odisha is one of India’s most vibrant landscapes of community-led conservation — a place where ecological wisdom, cultural identity and democratic governance converge. Long before state-led forest management, forest-dependent communities evolved collective systems to regulate resource access, conserve biodiversity and sustain livelihoods across generations.
Conservation here did not emerge from policy documents. It arose from the socio-economic and ecological struggles of communities. State-driven forest management shifted control over forests from village collectives to forest agencies, creating a crisis in governance and management. Illegal timber harvesting and over-extraction by forest mafias accelerated forest degradation, eroding soils, drying streams and destabilising ecological systems. Communities, who experienced these losses most directly, were the first to respond. Organised protection efforts spread from individual villages to village clusters and federations across the landscape.
The Ranpur range in Nayagarh district exemplifies this landscape-scale transformation. Coordinated protection by multiple villages converted barren hillsides into flourishing forests. In Kalahandi, community conservation followed a distinctive path: long-standing community forest protection was strengthened through the recognition of Community Forest Resource rights under the Forest Rights Act, 2006.
In Kalahandi, communities consolidated their collective strength into a shared governance architecture. Its institutional expression is the Kalahandi Gram Sabha Mahasangha, a federation of more than 100 Gram Sabhas, operating from village-level Community Forest Resource Management Committees through block clusters to a district-level Mahasangha.
The federation transformed the Gram Sabha from a passive recipient of state decisions into an active governing institution. It regulates forest access and protection, sets fair prices for Minor Forest Produce, negotiates directly with traders, and ensures that forest-based revenues flow back to the communities that protect the forests.
Here, protection and livelihood are inseparable. The forest endures because the community governs it; the community governs it because the forest sustains it.
In Mayurbhanj, home to Similipal, one of Asia’s largest biosphere reserves, community conservation has found one of its most significant legal expressions. In 2015, 43 villages inside the Similipal Tiger Reserve became only the second forest location in India to receive Community Forest Resource rights inside a tiger reserve. These villages are home to Bathudi, Kolha, Santal and other Adivasi communities who had protected these forests long before the reserve was notified.
The strength of this recognition became visible during the devastating wildfires that swept through Similipal. Areas under Community Forest Resource governance remained largely unaffected. Forest cover has improved, streams that were once seasonal now flow more reliably, and women’s producer groups collect and sell honey, siali leaf plates and pallu grass brooms at fair prices.
The fires confirmed what Adivasi communities had long argued: their presence protects the forest. It does not threaten it.
These stories reflect a wider pattern. Community conservation in Odisha emerges from lived ecological experience, cultural values and the shared imperative of survival.
Community conservation in Odisha is not a single institutional model. It is a rich mosaic of practices shaped by ecological conditions, cultural traditions and local governance histories. It spans forests, wetlands, coastal ecosystems and species-specific habitats, each reflecting the adaptive ingenuity of the communities that sustain them.
Odisha is nationally and internationally recognised for the scale and longevity of its Community Forest Management initiatives. Across Nayagarh, Bolangir, Koraput, Mayurbhanj, Dhenkanal, Nabarangpur and Kalahandi, villages have organised forest protection committees, established collective rules, undertaken rotational patrolling and developed context-specific ecological practices.
Community Forest Management became more than a system of forest governance. It became an assertion of rights over forests wrongly treated as open-access property. For Adivasi communities, it was also a reassertion of a relationship with the living world that predates the Indian state itself.
Many of Odisha’s conservation efforts qualify as Community Conserved Areas. These include the wetlands of Mangalajodi in Chilika, coastal habitats, mangroves and species-specific sanctuaries.
Along the Rushikulya coast, fishing communities patrol beaches and protect nesting Olive Ridley turtles. At Mangalajodi, community conservation efforts have gained global recognition for their stewardship of wetland biodiversity.
For Adivasi communities across Odisha, the forest has never been merely a resource to be managed. It is a living presence — a web of relationships between the human, the non-human and the ancestral.
Sacred groves, known locally as jahera or sarna, are among the oldest conservation institutions in the region. Among the Munda, Oraon and Santal communities, these groves are believed to be inhabited by village deities and ancestral spirits — the land’s true custodians. Trees within them are not timber to be extracted; they are kin, and intermediaries between the living and those who came before.
No tree may be felled without ritual permission from the village priest, whose authority comes not from the state but from the living covenant between community and forest. Ecologically, these groves preserve remnants of climax vegetation and function as biodiversity reservoirs within degraded landscapes. Prominent in Koraput, Kalahandi and Mayurbhanj, they embody conservation rooted in reverence, reciprocity and relationship.
Patrolling, monitoring and enforcement: At the operational heart of community forest governance lies the Thengapali system, an inclusive and participatory mechanism of forest watch and ward.
Under Thengapali, designated households take turns, on a strict rotational basis, to patrol the community forest each day. Each patroller carries a wooden baton — the thenga — symbolising both authority and duty. After each shift, the baton is ceremonially passed to the next household, creating an unbroken cycle of vigilance.
This is more than a practical system of protection. It is a daily enactment of collective responsibility — the community’s continuing covenant with the living world on which it depends and to which it remains accountable.
In Gunduriposi village in Nayagarh district, two distinct batons are used: bamboo for khesra forest, or village forest, and wood for reserve forest. This reflects the system’s ability to adapt to local ecological and governance contexts.
The thenga is not just a baton. It is a daily renewal of the community’s covenant with the forest.
Rules, fines and local accountability: Communities have also built comprehensive frameworks of monitoring and enforcement. Customary rules govern what may be collected, when and by whom. These include restrictions on green felling, bans on root extraction, time-bound firewood collection and committee approval before timber extraction.
Sacred trees such as amla, banyan, pipal, bel, kendu and neem are protected through cultural reverence. Their preservation is inseparable from the community’s moral obligation to the living landscape.
Enforcement is calibrated and community-driven. In Kalahandi, for instance, felling a tree on a weekend attracts a fine of Rs 1,500, compared with Rs 500 on weekdays; forest fires or poaching invite fines of Rs 20,000. Committees retain the discretion to waive fines for economically vulnerable offenders. The money collected is reinvested in forest maintenance.
In Adivasi society, women have long held a distinct relationship with the forest — as gatherers, healers and carriers of ecological knowledge embedded in plant names, seasonal cycles and oral traditions passed from mother to daughter. This custodianship is both a living archive and a moral responsibility. When the forest came under threat, it was this intimate and non-negotiable relationship that brought women to the front lines of its defence.
In Ranpur block in Nayagarh district, women’s entry into forest governance emerged from crisis. When male community members faced violence from timber mafias in the 1980s and 1990s, women stepped forward, taking over patrolling, confronting adversaries and managing protection in their own right.
In Dengajhari village, Budhei Bewa, an elderly widow, and other women confronted and foiled 200 illegal loggers, recovering felled timber through courage and moral authority alone. From that moment, women in Dengajhari and Gunduribari — and gradually in other villages across Nayagarh — adopted the Thengapali system. Four women patrolled daily while also framing their own resource rules: only dry and fallen wood could be collected for fuel; timber could be used only for agricultural purposes; commercial extraction and hunting were banned.
What began as a crisis response became lasting institutional architecture.
Under the Maa Maninag Jungle Surakhya Parishad, a federated body formed in 1998 and covering 207 villages in Ranpur, a Women’s Committee was constituted to mobilise women for Minor Forest Produce collection, negotiate fair prices and ensure that women’s voices shaped governance. Women now lead forest protection in 95 of the 207 villages.
Community Forest Resource Management Committees across Ranpur have 50 to 60 per cent women members, far exceeding the one-third minimum required under Rule 4(e) of the Forest Rights Act Amendment Rules, 2012. Women who had never left their villages now represent their communities in the Maa Maninag Jungle Surakhya Parishad, moving from exclusion to recognised decision-making authority.
In Similipal, Mayurbhanj, Community Forest Resource Management Committees, with at least 50 per cent women members, have prepared conservation and management plans aligned with traditional governance systems and approved by their Gram Sabhas. In Kalahandi, women’s participation in these committees has deepened forest governance — from preparing management plans that regulate bamboo and Minor Forest Produce extraction to undertaking Thengapali patrols against illegal felling.
The Jungle Kutir of Dengajhari exemplifies women’s role as architects of intergenerational conservation. Established in 2017, this community-led learning space transmits ecological knowledge in the way it has long moved through Adivasi society: through stories and songs, not documents.
Eighty-year-old Sashi Pradhan, known as Sashi Mausi, narrates the story of the forest’s degradation and recovery, while children learn about trees, medicinal plants and animal behaviour. Jungle Kutir has also expanded into rights-based education, hosting community discussions on the Forest Rights Act and forest governance.
Youth mobilisation, too, has deep roots. The Ramachandi Yubak Sangha in Dasmauza began patrolling in the mid-1970s and became the nucleus from which forest protection expanded across 80 villages by 1985.
Cultural practices continue to reinforce conservation values across generations. The Siali Utsav, in which women worship siali trees, and banyan worship during Savitri Pooja have woven conservation ethics into the ritual calendar of village life. They ensure that the relationship between community and forest is not merely an institutional arrangement, but a living inheritance.
Community conservation in Odisha is a story of democratic forest governance: self-initiated, locally grounded, ecologically effective and culturally enduring. It is a story in which forest-dependent communities, women, youth and Adivasi peoples emerge not as beneficiaries of conservation policy, but as its primary architects and stewards.
At its heart lies a worldview that the dominant conservation paradigm is only beginning to acknowledge: forests are not resources to be managed by distant authorities. They are living worlds sustained by communities whose identity, survival and moral life are inseparable from them.
The institutional sophistication of these initiatives — sacred groves, Community Forest Management committees, federated governance bodies, women-led patrols and intergenerational learning spaces — challenges narratives that portray local communities as drivers of ecological decline. Odisha’s evidence is clear: where communities are empowered, forests regenerate, biodiversity returns, livelihoods improve and social institutions deepen.
For conservation policy, the lesson is equally clear. Genuine community conservation cannot be engineered from above. It must be recognised, supported and legally secured, with communities at the centre of governance, ownership and benefit.
For Adivasi communities, this recognition is not charity. It is the restoration of a relationship with nature and the living world that colonial and post-colonial governance systematically undermined.
Nivedita Panda is a researcher working on forest rights, governance, biodiversity conservation, ecological justice, and community-based natural resource management with Vasundhara, Odisha
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth